There is a general low level animosity with Apple here...which is fine. This is a Windows site after all! However remember that Siri isn't something that Apple created over a short period of time. There is some serious science behind it (Siri has been evolving for almost a decade), and Apple has spent a lot of time figuring how to integrate it into IOS. So it's not just another "feature". Most responses (the Android folk especially), is "bah, had something like this since 2008". But this is not just word recognition...Siri understands *context* - that is not something easy to do...

Actually apple did not create siri, they bought them in april and then make it seem like they invented it. Its just another example of how Steve was able to see the future and know what would help sell his devices. Siri looks for keywords just like any other voice recog. Siri does learn though so is more AI than most. I do not see any demos of Siri recommending anything more than you ask from it. When you ask for greek food, it does not recommend the top rated burger joint right next door because in the last 15 new cities you visited you searched for the best burger joint. It only gives you direct answers to your questions. What context are you implying it recognizes anyway? Its a single sentence question. Not much context to be read into.

Yes, but MS did not take away those features from wm6.5 users. I've never had an app I bought removed by a company either.

Apple has a load of devices as well. Apple TV which can do the same as xbox, macs, air port, time machine, ipods...... they are equal in their ecosystems. Probably a good reason for that.

I find it hard to believe that the users of the most customizable tinkering mobile devices will be switching in mass to apple because of a talking AI which does many things for them.

I must be more private than I thought. I could never use a BT headset because it seems less private than holding my phone to my ear. Even though my voice is just as loud probably, it seems to me that I pay more attention to peoples conversations on BT headsets than I do to people talking with a phone to their ear. I actually give them some privacy. I find myself wanting to scream into the headset of the BT users. :D I just see Siri as a neat gadget I would play with for a month and then hardly ever touch again. At least until its well integrated into cars. As it is now, they show people with headphones on driving cars in the demo. That is illegal in my state. So only other way to get Siri to listen is to find your phone in the cupholder and press the home key.

100% true Apple's ecosystem is just as big but it depends if MS can lurk this features in the shadows and release it as a big surprise and just shock the world especially when Windows 8 drops. I think it would be easier to incorporate it in Windows rather than OSX because Windows will be using all 1 platform soon everything will be running Windows 8 even Xbox. For Apple you have IOS, OSX and whatever OS Apple TV runs on. My guess is that they are going to unify all of those platforms soon.

The company who provides the best services will win in the long run hopefully MS fine tunes Zune, Live, Skype, Bing, Skydrive, Hotmail so they can go to war with Apple. I can see a future where you pay X amount of money for unlimited music downloads, movie rents, skype talk time, 50 gigs of skydrive, office, xbox live, TV all in one bundle which can be accessed on every win8 platform I see a huge future in that and MS is the closest company in doing that IMO

Voice is one of those technologies that has been figured out theoretically but is pathetic in practice. If you went by what patents are out there, your phone should be able to recognize your voice as a digital voice print, use your digital voice print for security, execute commands, learn as you speak, dictate every word you speak accurately, read text in a realistic voice, send your digital voice print to other phones to read your texts or emails in your voice with your accent and/or mannerisms, etc.

Yet, when I try to text someone, "he played some," my phone thinks I'm saying, "get a plate." Somehow, I doubt Siri is much better. There's just something about speech that makes it more frustrating than convenient. After all, we text when we do not wish to speak anyway. People don't really want to talk to their phones. It's much easier to tap an icon than say, "open I'm a WP7," only to have the phone hear something completely different.

I don't mean to be negative, but I predict Siri will be no more successful than any other attempt at interactive voice technology.

I wish Microsoft's other services received as many updates as Bing does. Bing has exploded in the past couple of months with a ton of new features. Now imagine if they did the same thing with TellMe. MS doesn't need a complete Siri imitation to be competitive in the voice market. Just keep pumping new commands into TellMe on a regular basis. And do it OTA so we don't have to wait for carriers to release it. :D

I am going to guess MS is going to prepare Tango with more Voice access to applications but not the complete feature set. Once Windows 8 is out the upcoming Fall 2013 you will see Voice control over all of your devices so yeah you can tell your phone to record Game of Thrones on your Xbox Live TV while driving. Now thats the future of Voice Control

The rumor was the DC chip in the 4s was because of the workload Siri requires. Siri also requires the internet and I would guess to be inoperable without at least 3g. Siri understands a bit better than tellme maybe because it has better programming to guess about words it may have not heard very well. If you slur a couple words together but Siri understands other parts of the sentence it may use a deductive reasoning algorithm to determine the highest probability of what the missing words would be.

I ended up playing with Siri, and it is not as conversational - or how can I say flawless in how Siri's commercial portraits it to be. It cannot open up apps, like Mango can (I really like this feature). Also, Mango's voice seems to understand when you speak in a question better than siri compared to a statement.

When then iphone was first released I instantly thought "finally, the device I've dreamed about for years." Mostly the ability to use touch screen with fingers and not a stylus and access to the real web, not lousy WAP pages.

Of course, in practice it turned out to be hampered by an overly simplistic implementation, took webOS to finally bring the full dream around.

Anyway, Siri like voice is the next big thing I've been wanting. I don't care too much for it being on my phone...where I want it is on numerous tablets mounted to a wall in each room in my house. I want to be able to say "Jarvis, how does my commute look?" And, "Jarvis, anything I need to deal with today?" - "yes sir, you asked me to remind you that your car is on E" all while shaving or something. That to me is the future. That along with pico projectors hidden in your ceilings ready to turn any surface into a touch sensitive screen and motion controls. We very well may not "touch" our devices 5 years from now.

So what happens when MS fully unveils their Tellme plans and suddenly we have something like Siri but simultaneously available on our phones, TV's (through Kinect), our PC's and our tablets? And it's all linked by our Live ID's and Skydrive?

You see, Siri is really cool, but it's isolated to one device. Sure, it'll likely gradually expand to the iPad 3 and OSX and thus be more useful, but this approach is a bit different than what MS seems to be planning. There approach is more broad, approach Tellme as a tech that will service multiple devices instead of being limited to just one.

By next year, I'm confident we'll see exactly what I stated above at least on a basic level. But as others have mentioned, if the prototype Tellme video has implementation that is 2 or 3 years off, then maybe their approach implements too slowly. We'll see ...

I asked Siri when will skynet take over the world and she was not helpful. Maybe she was playing dumb because she did not want to give up her friends, but she did not even have a witty remark. Asked her if she was single and she said she could not find a dating app on the phone since none was installed. So, not as witty as most commercials make her out to be. She is great at finding phone numbers though. No more checking google to find a website then checking the contact us section for a number.... Just call "bw3 on main street chicago". Few moments later she asks if you want to call bw3 on main street. Slick.